Previously published as ‘My Melancholy Murderer’, revised

Hawk of Basti is the first chapter of a novelette that was never completed. Solomon Kane, insanely wandering the Dark Continent in the tatters of his European attire, looking to right as yet unknown wrongs, is shouted at by a picturesque white man in the depths of Africa, only to discover that a man he had sailed with under Drake was fleeing from a band of savages bent on his destruction. In explaining why he is in this situation the other man, Hawk of Basti, admits to having been a slaver, coming “…for the Slave Coast for a cargo of black ivory.” [1]

Kane carries the ju-ju stick of his blood-brother, the conjurer N’Longa, who essentially saves Kane in every adventure through the ancient talisman he gifted the white man. To Hawk, more of a standard white man of his time, he defends his use of the devil stick and its maker. “…beneath that black and wrinkled hide beats the heart of a true man, I doubt not.”

Hawk’s tale of a crew of white pirates slowly melting into oblivion as they fight off canoe loads of black tribesmen eventually becomes a tale along the lines of The Man Who Would Be King, for he found a lost city of black slaves that were cruelly ruled by a brown-skinned race of masters. In Hawk’s account the reader hears echoes of Mistress Bohannon’s cruel treatment of Howard’s “Aunt” Mary:

“The life of these black people is wretched indeed. They have no will of their own save the desires of their cruel masters. They are more brutally treated than the Indians of Darien are treated by the Spanish. [A million-person plus genocide.] I have seen black women flogged to death and black men crucified for the slightest of faults.” [2]

These specific cruel penalties, inflicted by mixed-race masters on black slaves, leads one to wonder if Howard had not read Lothrop Stoddard’s French Revolution in San Domingo, which was, in his day, a text that could be found in public libraries. This is a standard theme in much of Howard’s fiction, which not only represented current realities in the British Empire, but the then well-known history of Colonial life in the West Indies and New Orleans.

At the very time Howard was writing these adventures—for which he claimed to have drawn on the experiences of real life wandering and brawling men for the inspiration of his characters—numerous U.S. Marines, were doing side work in Haiti as security and law enforcement, in much the same capacity that former U.S. military persons currently operate in areas recently vacated by major U.S. ground forces. Did Howard meet one of these veterans or did he just read newspaper dispatched on the Marine occupation Haiti? He certainly was inspired by voodoo tales that may have had their roots in the French creole culture of New Orleans.

Whether these fantasies were all extrapolations based on the horror stories told by Mary and others about their experience being owned by cruel people [Such accurate observances are made in Black Canaan as the use of black snake skin whips for flaying the skin of a slave, which the hero refuses to use when interrogating a suspicious black man.], or reflect adventure tales told by marines returning from service in Haiti, or perhaps simply the product of his historical or newspaper reading, Howard’s wild, lurid, bloodstained worlds of slaves and masters nevertheless have a more authentic ring than milder treatments of the subject, such as Alex Haley’s Roots.

To conclude, Howard’s puritanical hero agrees to help the former sailor turned pirate and slaver he once shipped with to regain his place as usurper king over brown masters and black slaves, with the following statement, “”…I wish no earthly throne of pride and vanity. If we bring peace to a suffering race and punish evil men for their cruelty, it is enough for me.”

This fragment ends with Howard’s thoughts on humanity seeping through the patina of adventure: “Men are sheep, thought Solomon, as he saw the warriors, brown and black, meekly forming themselves according to Hawk’s orders.”

1. English captains with letters of marque from Elizabeth and her successors did prowl the west coast of Africa for slaves, sometimes raiding coastal settlements, but also bartering for their dehumanized cargo.

2. This is precisely what happened in French San Domingo as the mulatto slave owners used their black slaves with even greater cruelty than the savage white degenerates that owned the bulk of the slaves.